Thursday 1 November 2012 09.17 EDT
First published on Thursday 1 November 2012 09.17 EDT

Title: The Out Out Tour Live

Date: 2011

The setup: Standup's origins are working-class. In this respect, Micky Flanagan appears at first sight to be a typical standup comedian. Like Mike Reid or Jim Davidson, he wears his cockney credentials more openly than most, and draws much of his audience from a similar background. In this show, filmed in Essex , he likens diarrhoea to "emptying an old radiator" – hardly the most bourgeois of comparisons.

Yet while Reid and Davidson got and get their laughs by asserting what they feel are the threatened values of their background, Flanagan does thing differently. Having re-entered education, studied Kierkegaard at university and trained to be a teacher, he is now making money as a comic and has moved into the middle classes. He lives in East Dulwich, he drinks Zinfandel, he attends NCT classes and his son goes to a Montessori school. And most significantly, he has taken on the bourgeois tendency to self-deprecate. What Flanagan most often does with his old cockney values is attack them.

Funny, how? Stylistically, he is very similar to his unreconstructed forebears. He lampoons the cockney walk, although he himself struts about with something similar. He's got classic geezer-hands as well. When making a point, he runs a flat palm forward, like he's sliding a pony to you down the bar. Sometimes he makes that little flashing sign with all five fingers like someone flicking water off their hands. In the words "out out" (disgracefully ripped off by 118118), he even has something approaching a traditional catchphrase.

In speech, he also likes blunt instruments. During an extended bit on the rise of promiscuity (which he puts down to the "disappearance of fingering"), he remembers the old days when "you have to tit the girl up for about a year!" On his acquired habit of dipping bread in oil, he explains: "It's got to be extra virgin. It's got to be oil that ain't been fucked." Flanagan can do subtlety, sure, but the strength of that line is the lack of it.

Technically, he isn't perfect. He sniggers from time to time and stumbles over his words. At one point he tries to repeat a section for the DVD, but gets cheered down, and ends up yelling "You fuckers!" with a great big grin into the crowd. But it's part of the friendly informality of his shows that things should work this way.

Which is remarkable, really, in such a political performer. Flanagan pulls out all the usual talk of "Cressida" and "Hector" while he tickles middle-class shopping habits, but then he also praises the parents for encouraging their children, rather than forcing them to steal chickens in their gym bag, like his did. He's witty in his descriptions of the days when men were men, but not at all nostalgic. "They come home, they put the money on the table and they walk about in their pants," he says. "My old man did nothing. If he shut a cupboard door, he thought he was helping out." Next time you hear feminism called humourless, be sure to mention Micky Flanagan.

Comic cousins: John Bishop, Mike Reid, Al Murray, Jim Jeffries.

Steal this: "The most ambitious kid in our class was Gary Hutton. You know why? He wanted to drive a van."